Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“Two drowned Jamaican drug dealers floated up in a rock quarry. Not too smart to blab it around a beer joint. You talk this over with Jeff yet?”

Chug’s glasses were jet black and filled with the sun’s hot reflection. His mouth formed a shape like an elongated zero, then he licked the corners of his lips and picked up a glass of iced tea from the concrete and shook the ice in it.

“Maybe you should shag it on out of here,” he said.

“No need to be impolite.”

Even though I couldn’t see his eyes, I recognized the measured change taking place in him. It was characteristic of East End kids, or at least those Chug hung with. They could become whatever you wanted them to be. They just had to discover the role you required of them, the way a water dowser psychically probes the environment around him.

He sat up on the deck chair and wiped the sweat out of his hair with a towel so I could not read his expression when he spoke.

“I’m not feeling too good today, Mr. Holland. We have a family lawyer. I don’t know anything about drug dealers or drowned people or why I should be talking to Jeff Deitrich about anything except football,” he said.

“You think you can get rid of that kind of guilt by going to a cathouse?” I said.

He saw a man’s silhouette g

o across the sliding glass doors at the back of the house. He got up heavily from the deck chair and walked to the glass and tapped on it with his high school ring.

Chug’s father slid open the door, wearing a tan western suit, smiling brightly, his dentures stiff in his mouth.

“Daddy, this guy’s being a pain in the ass,” Chug said.

“You’re Mr. Holland, aren’t you?” Chug’s father said, still beaming, patting his son on the shoulder as Chug walked past him into the living room. “What can I do for you, sir?”

The skin around his mouth looked like rilled paper against the stiffness of his teeth. He waited for my response, as though I were a customer on the showroom floor at his dealership.

Temple Carrol, Wilbur and Kippy Jo Pickett, the Deitrichs and their attorney, Clayton Spangler, and I met that afternoon in a private dining room at the Langtry Hotel.

As though some cosmic irony were at work, the hotel’s owner had set a silver bowl of floating red roses in the middle of the dining table.

“To settle all claims and grievances, the Picketts are willing to offer Mr. and Mrs. Deitrich forty percent of the Pickett Oil Company. That includes forty percent ownership of all the equipment in place on the Wyoming tract and forty percent of all oil and gas revenues,” I said to Clayton.

“Pickett Oil Company? This guy digs postholes and sells watermelons for a living,” Earl said.

Clayton rubbed two fingers on his temple. “It’s not what we had in mind,” he said to me. He looked immense seated next to his client, his flat-brim hat crown-down by his wrist.

“Talk to the geologists who analyzed the core sample. There’s a black lake under those two hundred acres. It might extend into two other counties,” I said.

Clayton smiled. His eyes were blue, his graying blond hair trimmed close to the scalp. “My favorite line from Golda Meir was her statement about the Hebrews wandering for two thousand years, then settling in the only place in the Middle East that had no oil,” he said. “No offense meant, but Mr. Pickett seems to have the same kind of luck. As compensation for real loss, you’re offering my clients a chance to gamble. By the way, Mr. Deitrich’s employees looked at the equipment on the Wyoming property. It’s junk.”

“What did you come here expecting?” I said.

“All of it,” Peggy Jean interjected.

“You’re not going to get it,” I said.

Our eyes met across the table, as adversaries, all memories of our youth nullified by financial interests.

“This guy makes good on what he stole, on our terms, or he goes to prison,” Earl said, leaning forward, lifting his finger up at Wilbur.

“My wife can go back to the res, so I ain’t afraid of jail no more, Mr. Deitrich,” Wilbur said.

“There’s a complication here you don’t understand, Earl,” I said. “Wilbur gave me ten percent of his situation in Wyoming. I’m not about to let you rip off both me and the Picketts because you’re on the edge of bankruptcy. Here’s our best offer. You can buy the property at twenty-five hundred an acre and we retain half the mineral rights. But the drilling equipment and the producer’s end of the oil royalties remain ours. You had an opportunity to be a producer rather than simply a property owner. But that offer is off the table. Y’all can’t have it both ways.”

“You’re asking for a half million dollars,” Earl said.

“It’s a bargain,” I said to Clayton. “We’ll hold the mortgage for fifteen years at seven percent. The escrow account will be set up right here in town. If this isn’t satisfactory to the Deitrichs, they can refile criminal charges against my client and he’ll take his chances at trial.”